Leaky Heaven is 21 years old. It started on the heels of the last century in the fading light of postmodern hope, a year or two before the beginning of the end of the world. It started as a theatre company dressed up as a circus with clowns and acrobats and academics and drag queens and a bunch of kids and a couple of dogs on these complicated and beautiful occupied territories. A (perhaps) naively optimistic queer family circus to begin a new
millennium.

Everything was devised, difference was generative, nobody owned the ideas… We gutted big stories, stripped them to their skeleton and repopulated them with new ideas. Conference of the Birds, Antigone, The Orestia, and a nativity called Birthday Boy. It was rowdy and raw and we built a loyal audience.

We followed the morph-transformation that was at the heart of the hope and the circus morphed into installations and cited works and art walks and salons. Each piece seemed to hold the seed of the next one in the incubator of the devising room. In 2014 the society launched a new entity- Fight With a Stick an installation-based post-humanist experiment under this name we made borrowed Hesse’s Steppenwolf at the PuSh Festival, revolutions ( in an abandoned warehouse) Cinerama at the low tide flats with tide rising on the audience and Avista a mesmerizing performance of vintage theatre drops. In 2019 Fight With a Stick struck out on its own under the leadership of Alex Ferguson. As the pandemic hit Leaky Heaven has gone back to incubation with two development workshops: Location Sync, Neck of the Woods, and one social practice piece in collaboration with children RayCam Community Centre. Coming next Slip, Slap, Trip, Whack an investigation into slapstick comic violence with a group of neighbourhood children.

We continue with Theatre Replacement as Companies in Residence at the Russian Hall (where our studio is located) and assist in the management and governance of the Hall. It’s been a labour of love and raucous debate-we owe our existence to the generosity of funders (never flatter your benefactor said the Buddha) to the scores of thinkers, doers and makers and the thousands of watchers and listeners. And here a little further along on the road to the end we remain optimistic and struggle
to think and do and make and celebrate.